Written with bold authority, this book
teases the reader, sliding effortlessly from deep inside each
character up to a soaring bird’s-eye commentary on life
spent in transit. At its heart is the tale of an assembly of
foster children and the intersection of their lives with both
gritty reality and the golden dance of people who were “not
meant to partake in a life of the alleyways.” Klein swoops
in for a sip of the existence of an undocumented single mother
working in a sweat shop, alights briefly on the lesbian wife
of a wealthy female television producer, and swirls over and
around the owner of a café on the rim of the Silver Lake art
colony, but always comes back again to one of the foster
children.

The novel is punctuated by poetry
written by some of the kids in the perfect voice of pre-teens:
“I’m nine between two brothers: one fat, one skinny, both
mean,” yet the author’s own voice glides throughout the
book, a silver thread binding harsh reality. One of the foster
children, “a huge, hurt beast bleeding in the middle of a
tiny city,” sets fires, and the experience of his arson is
told in sharp, visceral accounts. Each fire he sets is “a
loop of orange brilliance in the everything-black of night.”
An unflinching spotlight shines on the undocumented mother,
revealing the drudgery and panic of work hidden from the law:
“fingers slashed and stabbed, needles grooving skin like a
record.” Yet Klein suffuses the woman’s story with magic,
through the letters she writes home: “Los Angeles is
beautiful in the winter. The air seems surprised by itself.”

At every turn, the author has a surprise
for her readers. Eamon, a history major at Loyola Marymount,
visits his girlfriend Zrinka “on the top floor of a former
fish-packing plant” and has a surreal late-night encounter
with the teen son of the undocumented mother, when the boy
leans in and kisses Eamon: “It was exactly the same and
exactly different from kissing Zrinka.” Chapters later,
Eamon reappears, plunging deep into the “spider sex” of
postmodern bisexual relationships, “three of us bunched in a
row, giggling, our naked butts in the air,” yet Klein
follows this chapter with a cartoon of a young man in his car,
commuting from one hill in Los Angeles to another. It is more
than a cartoon, of course; it is a graphic novel in itself, in
which the author states, “He could fly, but the air gets
cold at night over the chaparral.”

It is no surprise, however, that the
author is the winner of the nationwide Ben Reitman prize, and
has a number of short stories in literary journals such as Blithe
House Quarterly. In this novel, each chapter is a story in
itself, yet all are pieced together seamlessly, creating a
terrain in which life is simply lived, wherever or whatever
the circumstance, or the cost.

Even life at its most desperate is
unapologetic. When a lover of one of the foster children is
confronted and asked the whereabouts of his girlfriend, he has
nothing to offer: “Survival had taken up all the space
inside him.” He stumbles away, crossing a street where
traffic soon conceals his form in the highways that define Los
Angeles. A black actress muses about time spent driving to
auditions or to the “temp” jobs that support her: “I
composed love songs to my Thomas Guide, and a breakup song
after one unfortunate incident on 5. I mean the 5. The
freeways were self-important like that.” The teen son of the
undocumented mother has different view: “There’s something
about car rides. You both face forward and things come out of
you that might stay buried if you had a pair of eyes to answer
to.”

Still, most people use the freeways to
hide. They take the 110, slithering past South Central Los
Angeles and when “given the option, they would seal
themselves in vehicles that resembled army tanks, turn up the
radio and condition the air.” This book does the opposite,
stripping Los Angeles to its essentials but spinning a golden
web across its freeways and alleys, leaving the reader in
breathless wonder